March of the turkeys

Each summer, the multiplexes spew out a succession of schlockbusters. These films take years to make, and cost millions - so why are they so dire? Top-level Hollywood insiders spill the beans to Ravi Somaiya

By now, we're immune to blockbusters with flabby expository dialogue, lumpen performances and a CGI budget that should have been spent on a script. It's expected. When a good one comes along - the first Spiderman, for example - critics and viewers are taken aback.

But, for the most part, the multiplexes show rubbish - directed by the likes of Michael Bay, whose films (Transformers, The Island, Armageddon) score an 8% average rating on the online reviews aggregator Rottentomatoes, or Roland Emmerich (10,000BC, The Day After Tomorrow; he scores 20% on Rottentomatoes), or Brett Ratner (X-Men: The Last Stand; he scores 15%). That these men get paid between $5m and $10m per film makes it more mysterious, because they can presumably afford the £16.98 Amazon asks for a 14-movie Hitchcock box set to see what a good Hollywood blockbuster looks like.

All three have new movies out this year; Bay and Emmerich both had budgets of $200m for theirs. But even if the reviews live up to past form (and those for Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen haven't exactly been glowing), we must be fair to the directors: they shouldn't have to shoulder the blame alone. It takes a team of talented financiers, writers, producers, directors, gaffers, film processors and editors a long time, a lot of thought and roughly the GDP of Tonga to make an idea into a turkey. So how does it all go wrong? Here - anonymously, for fear of jeopardising their careers - are some of Hollywood's finest explaining why films, including some of theirs, go bad.

One multi-Oscar-winning writer and director is a cynic. "These people just don't know what good is," he says of his experience with studios and blockbuster producers. A screenwriter who recently worked on a big studio film panned by reviewers - one called it "preposterous" - doesn't agree, but says there are pitfalls built in to the process. His movie starred a marquee name not perhaps renowned for expressive acting. "A lot of people say it might have been better without him," says the writer, "but there just is no movie unless he's in it. The studio wanted a vehicle.

"The dialogue and what was in the scenes changed 95%, so it was kind of like watching my movie in Japanese or something. What I wrote was - I hesitate to use the phrase 'more sophisticated', but it had a lot more character, whereas the final film had a lot more action. Everything was just on a platter for viewers. A lot of writers don't mind leaving one or two people out of 10 behind. But directors are pressured from above to dumb it down."

That, he thinks, is why dreadful expository dialogue is credited to ostensibly good writers who no doubt cringe like the rest of us when they hear it. Such as Hollywood royalty Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, who wrote the $150m Dan Brown adaptation Angels and Demons, which was widely critiqued, by Xan Brooks in this paper among others, for characters who provided a "running commentary" on the action for viewers.

The test-screening process - in which studios show their most expensive films to focus groups and then change them accordingly - also has to take some of the blame for the artistic failure of his movie, says the screenwriter. "They're going for the widest possible audience. So you end up having a movie that doesn't offend anyone and which everyone doesn't mind, instead of a movie some people love. But I never lost sight of the fact that I was happy to see it made."

Would he be as happy to see, say, Brett Ratner attached to his next project, if it would guarantee a green light? He sighs. "I've reached the point where I'm lucky enough to say I'd be sad. The buck always stops with the director, in my experience. It's a director's medium."

A producer responsible for what he admits were some less-than-stellar big-budget films is pragmatic about the process: "Films are not easy to get made. And a producer is constantly trying to get them off the ground. If there's a director whose films show a profit, such as Michael Bay or Brett Ratner, and you can present that director as attached, then you may get the money to make your film." And Bay and Ratner do make money, as both producers and directors: they have grossed almost a billion dollars each for films they've been attached to.

"It's a business," says the producer. "They're not art films. We do sometimes employ brilliant screenwriters to do passes on things; some of the blockbuster scripts are actually great. But studio films are, for better or worse, made by a committee - it's not the vision of one person. People you call 'bad' directors are good at working on big movies. They end up sitting in a room with a dozen people and they have to catch the ideas flying around and place them in the film. There's not much you can do about it. It's a complicated process."

One director, responsible for well-received and Oscar-nominated films budgeted between $20m and $50m, sees such blockbuster-managers as failures, regardless of what the balance sheet shows."They don't really direct at all. A script is only a ticket for the journey; it's not necessarily a map. If you have a director without any vision or understanding of the way film works, it's going to be bad, no matter how good the script was."

This particular director once asked for his name to be removed from a film after a clash of egos with a star, so unhappy was he with the finished product. But he now says he has learned to balance the urge to resist pressure from above with the fact that it's futile to fight the star system. "The main character, played by the star, is the film," he says. "If the director really gets on with the actor, has a shared vision, knows deep down that their job is to get the best possible performance out of that actor and they have respect for each other, then the collective efforts of those two minds goes a long way to making a good film. You can see it on the screen when that hasn't happened."

"It's narcissism and power that ruin movies," agrees one veteran publicist. Over three decades, she has seen plenty of those ego clashes between producers, directors and stars. "A lot of producers really want to direct. And if the director is someone who's malleable, for whatever reason - maybe because he couldn't get the thing greenlit for 10 years - the power of the producer can corrupt."

She has seen stories and scripts and characters and performances - the very heart of the movie, in short - change beyond recognition on set. "Anything can prompt a rewrite or a reshoot," she says. "It could be the director or producer's wife calling to say, 'I just read this new draft and you cut out that girl I thought was great,' or, 'You said my sister-in-law was going to have a part in the movie and you cut her scene out.' It could be that the star felt the power had shifted to the co-star and wanted it back."

When scripts are revised on set, they are colour-coded to avoid confusion. The first draft is white, the second blue, then pink, yellow, green, gold, salmon, cherry and then back to white again, referred to as double white. "I've seen scripts get to triple gold," the publicist says. "They look like rainbows. The original screenplay? God only knows what that was.

"And once you're finished shooting, there's more. The stars put in their two cents in during the edit, the director puts in his two cents, the producers do the same. A bad editor can ruin a film. A great editor can take a movie and say, 'You know what? The third act is the first act. Or the second half of that act is pointless.' They can rescue it.

"There are so many variables. Making a good movie is like getting an ice sculpture out of a block of ice. There's something beautiful in there, but it's fragile and you have to find it."

This publicist has worked with Michael Bay, and has seen him interact with those who pay his wages. So why does she think he gets hired despite the merit or otherwise of his movies? She thinks for a moment. "Michael is a good salesman," she says. "He's great in meetings. And he has great hair."

Bear that in mind if you find yourself sitting through Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, wondering how the hell it got made.